Money Talks: What if the environment could pay to be protected?

In today’s society money talks and turns into power. The environment may not be able to speak for itself, recently researcher have put a price tag on the value of the ecosystem services being provided by the natural environment worldwide. That price tag: $48.7 trillion USD. An article in the New York Times discusses how natural ecosystems provide protection for human infrastructure and how the costs of replacing those protective functions with man made devices such as levees is actually much more expensive.